Bill Clinton eulogizes Richard Mellon Scaife: Nemesis, then friend

Bill Clinton on Saturday fondly memorialized one of the key financiers of what Hillary Clinton years ago deemed the “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

Speaking at a private memorial service in southwestern Pennsylvania for Richard Mellon Scaife, who died last month, Clinton recalled how, after his presidency, he built a “counterintuitive friendship” with the conservative billionaire, according to an account of the speech in one of the newspapers Scaife owned.

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“He fought as hard as he could for what he believed, but he never thought he had to be blind or deaf” to other views, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review quotes Clinton saying of its former publisher. A spokesman for Clinton declined to comment.

Scaife, who inherited a fortune from the Mellon banking and oil empire, steered millions of dollars to groups that savagely attacked the Clintons throughout the 1990s. Scaife backed media outlets and nonprofits that pushed scandal after scandal that buffeted the Clinton administration — from the Whitewater real estate controversy to the Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky sex scandals to raising doubts about the deaths of Clinton aides Vince Foster and Ron Brown.

Scaife confidant Christopher Ruddy, who rose to prominence on the Clinton scandal beat at the Tribune-Review, arranged Clinton’s appearance at Saturday’s memorial. Afterward, he acknowledged his former boss “was the bete noire of the Clinton administration during those years, sort of like what the Kochs are to the Obama administration today.”

But Scaife became enamored with Clinton’s post-presidential philanthropic work on AIDS in Africa and other issues, and a thaw began, said Ruddy, now CEO of the conservative media outlet Newsmax, in which Scaife was a minority shareholder.

Ruddy and the late former New York City Mayor Ed Koch helped broker a July 2007 meeting with Scaife and the former president in the Clinton Foundation’s Harlem office, and Scaife donated more than $100,000 to the foundation. Still, Scaife raised eyebrows by praising Hillary Clinton during her 2008 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, and his Tribune-Review later endorsed her over Barack Obama ahead of the Pennsylvania primary.

In introducing Clinton on Saturday, the chairman of Scaife’s media company, H. Yale Gutnick, a longtime Scaife friend, said the former president and Scaife “shared a mutual love of America,” according to Ruddy, who said Clinton talked about how Thomas Jefferson and John Adams initially clashed before finding common cause and becoming allies and friends.

And the Tribune-Review quoted Clinton saying, “Our differences are important. Our political differences, our philosophical differences, our religious differences, our racial and ethnic differences, they’re important. They help us to define who we are. … But they don’t have to keep us at arm’s length from others.”

The ex-president’s ability to find common cause with former adversaries is a model that other political figures in an increasingly polarized Washington would be wise to emulate, Ruddy said.

“Think about the outrageous things that were said about him, including by me, and he was able to overcome that and reach out to his critics and his adversaries and make them his friends and work together on the things we agree with,” Ruddy said. “It’s on the level of Nelson Mandela — that type of higher thinking and ability to forgive and forget, and it’s an example of how people who have partisan and ideological differences can work together for the common good.”

At Saturday’s memorial, which was held at the Ligonier, Pennsylvania, estate where Scaife grew up and which was attended by more than 100 employees of his media outlets, Clinton was presented with a photo of Hillary Clinton meeting with Scaife before the 2008 Pennsylvania primary.

And Ruddy predicted that her husband’s willingness to reach across the aisle will cause some major Republican donors who fought the Clinton administration alongside Scaife to be less hostile if Hillary Clinton runs for president in 2016.

“There is a realization among high-level donors and sophisticated politicos on the Republican side that Hillary Clinton is a centrist Democrat who is pro-American business and is very strong on national security,” he said. “There is a sense that she and her husband share a similar worldview.”

CLARIFICATION: This article was altered to clarify the nature of Scaife’s investment in Newsmax.